'Long days. Long days.'

Another substantial commute today as we did a there-and-back trip to St. Louis, which is about a two and a half hour flight each way. Ralph Larmann met us at Newark airport and will join us for the next few shows. He is a photographer who has a particular talent for shooting live shows and stage productions. So much so that he has published two volumes of such pictures entitled simply 'Stage Design', being coffee table tomes of gorgeous colour images of all manner of stages productions; everything from high opera to rock & pop, musicals, theatre, even some live TV events. Ralph has shot a few of the 360 shows, including the 'lord of the rings' shot as we call it, with the incredible mirrorball starburst that was used on the tour posters in Europe. He hasn’t shot the current version of the show though, so we thought it worthwhile for him to do so before it all goes away forever.

It was staggeringly hot in St. Louis, as seems to be becoming a pattern of late. We squelched and sweated our way to show time though even nightfall didn’t seem to lower the temperature to any great degree.

I sat with Ralph Larmann on the way back to New York looking through some of the images he’d shot that night. He’s using an extraordinary Leica camera with a fixed lens (some sort of prototype that Leica have given him), which has such speed and clarity that you can zoom into wide shots practically until you can see the audience’s nasal hair. I can’t wait to see what he manages to get over a few shows. It was a long flight ‘home’ and by the time we’d got to Newark airport and into Manhattan it was way past 4am. Long days, long days.

Within the bands entourage (certainly by comparison to the crews clockwork scheduling) travel departure times are often a little loose. This morning was especially so, due to three contradictory memos which had been emailed out last night and this morning.

There was a 6.30pm conference call arranged between Bono (Dublin), The Edge (Los Angeles), Steve Matthews (London) and myself (also London) to blow the cobwebs off our brains and discuss the reincarnation of the Vertigo Tour.

I was planning on resurrecting the tour diary today, being the day we were scheduled to fly to Auckland for the load-in tomorrow. However, its now old news that the remainder of the tour dates have been postponed, so Im not going anywhere further than the corner cafe. Its been a very weird week indeed - much akin to driving into a wall.